(Bloomberg News) Robert Rhea logged on to his iPad in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, one day in August to turn off the air conditioning in his Dallas home ahead of cooler Texas weather.
Rhea, who was attending a wedding and tracked his daily power usage on an iPhone app supplied by TXU Energy, estimates the remote tweaking saved him $175 on his electricity bill that month. He controls his home temperature through a wireless thermostat TXU gave him in exchange for allowing the utility to shut off his air conditioning during periods of high demand.
The 57-year-old owner of a tile refinishing business is among a new breed of conservationists that analysts say is curtailing sales of electricity and driving an unprecedented shift in the $374 billion U.S. power industry. After homes and businesses stocked up on energy-saving gadgets and appliances, power use per unit of economic growth fell to a record in 2011, according to the U.S. Energy Department.
"There is a quiet revolution in energy efficiency going on in our country," said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, Chicago-based advocates of clean energy.
The U.S. is a proving ground for nations such as Japan, Britain, Germany and Canada that also have started offering more efficient appliances to consumers and testing "smart" technology that powers down homes when prices surge.
Falling Demand
The result: demand for electricity is shrinking even as economies grow, an effect that's starting to erode sales and profit at U.S. utilities from New England to Oregon. They include OGE Energy Corp. and Teco Energy Inc., both of which have underperformed the 10 percent gain this year in the Russell 1000 Utilities index.
Electricity use in the U.S. declined 2 percent this year through Sept. 22, and was down 3 percent from a year earlier as consumers buy light bulbs that burn 25 percent fewer watts and install technology that turns off appliances when the delivery grid is strained. The industry produced $374 billion in revenue in 2011, the Edison Electric Institute said.
Power and coal consumption dropped last year to 2,790 British thermal units per real dollar of U.S. gross domestic product, a 32 percent drop from 1981 levels and a record low for data collected since 1973, the Energy Department said on its website.
Learner credits a 20-year push by the federal government to promote energy-saving appliances. Consumers bought 280 million such products in 2011, cutting their utility bills by $23 billion, the Environmental Protection Agency said on its website.